After a wonderful family vacation we are safely back in rainy Alaska. We enjoyed warm, humid, sunny days in the Midwest and loved every minute of it, knowing it would be cool and rainy upon our return. I made a few interesting observations pertaining to couponing and saving money while on this trip that I would like to share. The most obvious is that food (and just about everything) is SO much cheaper in the Midwest. Items that I purchase on sale and with coupons up here where priced at that cost to start with :-(. I did take some coupons with me... yup, I'm a geek. Thanks to Life in my land blog I won a coupon organizer that is perfect for traveling and came in very handy. I still found myself wishing I had my big binder because boy I could have cleaned up with some savings a few times but then I would have had to ship another suitcase back and the fee for that would have eaten up the savings LOL.
Perhaps my biggest disappointment was with shopping at the outlet malls. I was really looking forward to buying clothes for the kids and maybe some household items at deep discounted outlet prices. Boy was I wrong. What I actually discovered was I could get better deals with sales up here or online. Maybe I was there on the wrong week but I think the outlet stores are hoping that just by putting the term outlet in the name we will be dumb enough to think we are saving money. I went to Coldwater Creek in Chicago (not an outlet) and found 2 blouses on sale for $10- I then went to 2 Coldwater Creek stores in Indiana and MI and both of those stores had the same blouse at a higher cost- Hmmmm???? Again, this was not really a bad thing since I was able to use the same luggage we went with and did not ship anything extra back.
My final dissapointment on an otherwise fantastic trip was my own fault. I forgot to get the Sunday papers!!! I did get the insert from my MIL for one week but the next Sunday I was planning to purchase a few papers but had an extraordinarily busy day with my daughters baptism, son's birthday and a large family picnic. I should have known better than to plan all of that on a "coupon Sunday" LOL! And darn if it wasn't the P&G insert day :-). Oh, well. It did give me time to reorganize my binder when I got home and I am ready for my double papers tomorrow. I am thinking about using a coupon service to get the inserts from the lower 48 but not sure if I am that hard core just yet- any thoughts???
2 comments:
I think you'd be better off asking your MIL to send you the inserts out of her Sunday paper every week and you just pay her for stamps. To get the full inserts from the coupon clipping services costs a mint in shipping (like 5.00 and something minimum) so unless you are buying a good 50 or so inserts I just don't know if it is worth it or not. If you could find like four other people to go in with on your order and split the shipping...yeah I think that could work :).
I just asked my mom to send me coupons and she feels good being able to help me out by sending them to me once a week. A lot of other people who get coupons from the Lower 48 seem to be in the same boat. Just a thought. Good luck and I'm jealous of your awesome vacation weather.
Thanks- that's great input. I need to find a friend I can ask- My MIL is 88 and is now getting confused easily, but I can probably find someone. Again, I appreciate the feedback! :-)
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